Josephine Baker

I’ve always believed that diversity makes for a more beautiful world. I also thought that most people felt that way, these days. Imagine my surprise when word began to leak out this past year that the fashion shows were employing more and more white models, and less of those of other colors. Having only skinny white girls on the runways is far from completing fashion’s dreamscape. I know Naomi Campbell is bad-tempered, but honestly—we need black, white, Hispanic, and Asian (and would a Native American hurt, either?) women to represent our global world.

For years now, Saudi, Middle Eastern, and Asian women have been major couture buyers. The big designers have customers in all shades of the rainbow as a result of the global economy. Furthermore, as Cathy Horyn says, who writes for the New York Times blog On the Runway, diversity can be a means for “Beauty and Soul.” I hope the Fall 2008 New York Fashion Week organizers are listening: put more models of different races out there for all to see. Fashionable fantasies shouldn’t be for just one group.

Josephine Baker had to leave 1920s America for France in order to receive the acclaim she deserved for her talent. Do we really wish for a return to those times? This is a clear-cut case of NOT wanting everything old to be new again…

As we get into the twentieth century, events reveal themselves that show just how important a role blacks begin to play in popular culture and the arts. Josephine Baker and American jazz musicians wowed 1920s Paris, and Europeans enthusiastically swayed to the beat from across the Atlantic. From zoot suits to hip hop, we owe black musicians, entertainers, and artists a debt for their contributions to contemporary cool.

Fortunately, scholarship since the 1980s has been at work to rectify the omissions of the first major publications on Art Deco. Just as we’ve learned how African tribal art animated the works of the early Modernist painters and sculptors, so do we now get more information on the people who helped make it the Jazz Age. In 2006, the one-hundredth anniversary of her birth, an exhibition, Josephine Baker: image and icon, paid homage to her legendary career.